The next steps to space
Posted: Friday, April 27, 2007 1:54 AM by Alan Boyle
Zero Gravity Corp. |
Physicist Stephen Hawking floats free during a parabolic airplane flight Thursday,
while Zero Gravity Corp.'s Peter Diamandis looks on at right. The weightless apple
is a tribute to Isaac Newton, who was famous for his theory of gravitation.
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Is Stephen Hawking's excellent adventure over, or is it just getting started? In the wake of his unprecedented weightless flight, the focus is shifting to the theoretical physicist's goal of actually flying to outer space. There's no other interpretation you can put on his latest one-liner: "Space, here I come!"
Hawking won't be going to space all that quickly, and the trip won't be as easy as Thursday's flight turned out to be.
By all reports, the paralyzed Briton weathered acceleration forces 1.5 times as strong as normal Earth gravity on Thursday and still felt hale enough to go out to dinner after the post-flight champagne party. But the G-forces that space fliers are expected to endure on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo - the rocket plane that Hawking someday hopes to ride - may be four times stronger than what he felt Thursday. That will give the physicians on Hawking's team and the Virgin Galactic team plenty to think about between now and the 2009-2010 time frame, which is the earliest Hawking could fly.
There's more to consider here, beyond whether or not a high-profile professor gets to fulfill his personal space dreams three years from now. Even if Hawking never goes up himself, he just might have a big effect on the future of spaceflight.
Some of the things Hawking has been saying are music to the ears of those in the vanguard of the personal spaceflight revolution. On one level, his message is about opening up elements of the space experience to people who don't fit the "Right Stuff" profile. In fact, space columnist/consultant Taylor Dinerman writes in The Wall Street Journal that providing a friendlier environment for gravity-challenged people such as Hawking could be "one of the greatest potential virtues of creating a spacefaring civilization."
On another level, Hawking spent the most time during his preflight interview with NBC News talking about how the space effort needed to engage "the entrepreneurial engine that has reduced the cost of everything from airline tickets to personal computers." Only then, he said, could the cost of space travel fall to the point that we could start thinking about expanding our living space beyond Earth, as an insurance policy in case the unthinkable happened on our home planet.
That same impulse - the drive to make humanity a multiplanet species - is what's beneath the fascination with outer space you find in people like SpaceX's Elon Musk, Amazon.com/Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos, Bigelow Aerospace's Robert Bigelow, Scaled Composites' Burt Rutan, and so on. They're definitely not just interested in getting a 62-mile-high view of Earth and feeling a few minutes of weightlessness.
Neither is Charles Lurio, an independent space consultant who was particularly taken by Hawking's comments to NBC. In an e-mailed response, Lurio writes that Hawking "gets it" and adds:
"The problems we've had in creating practical spaceflight are not due to something inherent in spaceflight; they're due to a legacy that hasn't allowed the commercial sector to develop new mass markets and solve those problems."
There is an undertone in the "New Space" movement - reflected in Hawking's comments as well as Lurio's - that the NASA model for government-funded human spaceflight isn't working. For example, Lurio and like-minded observers are particularly worried that NASA may undercut its biggest enterpreneurial initiative to date - the $500 million Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, or COTS - by forging long-term deals for spacecraft from the Russians and the Europeans.
But COTS illustrates that NASA can lend a hand to entrepreneurs. So does the fact that Hawking's flight took off and landed from the space agency's Shuttle Landing Facility under the terms of a commercial arrangement with Zero Gravity Corp., which organized Thursday's flight. Zero Gravity is reportedly at an important stage in talks with NASA over providing weightless flights for the space agency on a similarly commercial basis.
Someday, commercial suborbital spaceflights as well as zero-gravity planes may well be making use of the Shuttle Landing Facility. In fact, the first test runs to check the potential noise levels for suborbital craft were conducted just this month.
These developments may sound like industry-insider nuts and bolts, but they're the small sparks that could rev up the entrepreneurial engine that Hawking has been talking about.
If you want to get your own up-close and personal look at how the engine is being developed, several opportunities are coming up in the next few months. Click on over to the Web sites listed below and see what strikes your fancy. Who knows? Maybe even Stephen Hawking could learn a thing or two:
- The International Space Development Conference brings together "New Space" and "Old Space" in Dallas from May 25 to 28.
- NewSpace 2007 definitely caters to the entrepreneurial set, although you'll also find fellow travelers from NASA and the other traditional space players. This year the meeting is in Washington from July 18 to 21.
- The Mars Society has its annual convention in Los Angeles from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2. You'll find plenty of space heavyweights and Red Planet researchers, as well as grass-roots advocates who would love to say "Mars, here we come!"
- The big event in my book is the Wirefly X Prize Cup, which will take place from Oct. 24 to 28 at locations in southern New Mexico. The announcement of the dates and venues was issued just this week. There's a symposium as well as weekend shows featuring rockets that really blast off (or perhaps blow up, but in a safe and sane way). The X Prize Foundation is setting its sights on attendance in the range of 100,000 visitors this year.
It's been a challenging couple of days here in Florida - with so much scrambling around from one place to another, and so much writing off the cuff, that one reader felt compelled to file a protest. "You would think Alan Boyle would know how to write a complete sentence," Jim West wrote.
But if I ever felt like whining over a 17-hour workday, one look at how Hawking triumphed over far greater adversity shut me up right quick. I think his perseverance, even more than his perspicacity, is what makes him so endearing. If you haven't read the scores of comments about Hawking that I've just gotten around to approving, take a spin through the feedback and add your own.
Next week, I promise to write in complete sentences. Mostly.
Update for 4:20 p.m. ET April 27: In the wake of Hawking's zero-G flight, the well-wishers include Alan Stern, NASA's associate administrator for the science mission directorate:
"Stephen Hawking's flight to experience zero gravity is exciting. I can say from flying hundreds of parabolas aboard NASA KC-135s myself that the experience is eye-opening, exhilarating and personally fulfilling. My own experiences primarily were participating in research in space motion sickness and later, low-gravity accretion. But it's the 21st century now, and I expect more and more scientists to be conducting research in zero gravity, and even in space, as new vehicles and venues for such research open.
"Space is as much a place for scientists, I believe, as the arctic, Antarctic, and the deep ocean. And Dr. Hawking is showing the way.
"I want to extend my congratulations to him on his first taste of zero gravity and offer my best wishes for the realization of his dream of launching into space itself."
